The Sting
| image = | image_size = | episode = 66 | season = 4 | prod_code = 4ACV12 | airdate = June 1, 2003 | runtime = 30 minutes | director = Brian Sheesley | guests = | writer = Patric M. Verrone | storyboards = | subtitle = A By-Product of the TV Industry | cartoon = | preceded_by = "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" | followed_by = "Bend Her" }} Plot The Planet Express crew are sent on a mission that the previous Planet Express crew didn't survive, collecting honey from space bees. Bender Bending Rodríguez is given a tape to speak the bee's language of dancing so they don't attack Philip J. Fry I and Turanga Leela. Leela finds an adorable baby queen bee and decides to take it back to Earth so they can create their own hive. Bender accidentally insults the queen bee and the space bees start to chase the crew. While escaping in the Planet Express ship, the baby queen bee wakes up. Fry stands in front of Leela to protect her, but it runs him right through, its sting only pricking Leela, but killing Fry. Bender tosses the bee into the airlock and shoots it into space, where it gets hit by a space-truck. Later, a funeral is held and Fry's coffin is shot into space. During the funeral, a teary Kug from Amazon Women In The Mood declares Fry made great "snu snu." Meanwhile, a pew filled with women, including Morgan Proctor, Petunia, and Michelle Jenkins all demurr, wiggling their hands and saying "Ehhh...". Even the radiator Fry once allegedly made out with is there, whistling doubtfully. Later that night, after Fry's funeral, Leela starts to experience strange dreams, all ending with Fry telling her, "You have to wake up." The other employees of Planet Express start to get concerned about her, thinking she is going insane. Later that night, Leela has a dream where Fry gives her his jacket: she wakes up with his jacket, which she finds out the next day is really her off-the-rack lime green jacket. The crew finds out that she has been eating space honey. Zoidberg warns her that one spoonful calms her down, two helps her sleep but three will put her in a sleep so deep that she'll never wake up. Bender then speaks with Amy's voice. Later, Leela eats some space honey to calm herself, and spills the royal jelly on the couch, which turns into a naked, sticky and confused Fry who asks, "Why am I sticky and naked? Did I miss something fun?" According to the Professor's Gizmometer, the royal jelly Fry had fallen in during the mission had an imprint of his DNA, causing him to reform when it mixed with Fry's hair and skin (and blood) in the couch. However, when he asks Leela to "wake up," she finds out that this is just another dream. Leela flies out into space to retrieve Fry's corpse (to keep under her mattress to remind herself that he is really dead), and locates the coffin slowly rotating in the void, to the sounds of "Also Sprach Zarathustra." Inside is a bizarre colored tunnel... She wakes up in her apartment (again) with the other employees' faces huge and filling the walls, yelling, "You killed Fry!" Thinking she is insane, she decides to take enough space honey to sleep and dream forever. Fry's framed picture is beside her bed, and it starts talking to her as Fry. Leela throws the jar at a large bee that's threatening her, creating instead many more smaller bees all around. As she hugs the framed photo, Fry's image implores Leela again and again to "wake up," and finally she does wake up, in a bed in a hospital, with a sobbing, dishevelled, unshaven Fry saying "wake up" beside her. Apparently, the stinger went through Fry and she got all the poison. The others come in and are shocked and delighted to see her awake. Bender states that she was "in the best coma he had ever seen." They tell her she's been in a coma for two weeks with no chance of recovery. Amy tells Leela that Fry never left her side for a second, speaking to her constantly to "keep her mind together." Zoidberg even likens Fry to a "Parrot of the Sea." The episode ends with them hugging and both whispering that the other needs to take a shower. Ongoing Themes Death, Injury * The noisily horrible deaths of the previous Planet Express crew are played out on their ship's black box. * Fry's emergency high-speed escape-pack crisis response unit slams him against a few walls, since he has put the device on upside down. * At least one space-bee explodes while chasing the Planet Express crew. * Fry and Leela are both stung by the baby queen space-bee they are bringing home, resulting in Fry's death. * The space-bee that Leela intended to bring home is smashed on the windshield of a passing space-truck. * After a commercial break, Bender is on fire from the waist up, for reasons that are not explained. * Leela watches the other crew members explode one-at-a-time as a space-bee stings them. Doppelgängers * Bender impersonates a space-bee. * Amy and then Hermes speak to Leela in Farnsworth's voice, and Bender in Amy's voice. * Fry appears variously as a zombie, a strangely romantic version of himself, a version of himself made of royal jelly and his bodily fluids from the couch and a talking photograph on Leela's nightstand. * The other crew members' faces serve as wallpaper and carpeting in Leela's bedroom. Fry and Leela After their harrowing escape from the space-bees, Fry suddenly has feelings for Leela again. He realizes that he doesn't want anything to happen to her and comments that they need to be more careful. When the baby queen space-bee attacks, Fry puts his body between the bee and Leela to protect her. While Leela is in a coma she seems to have a lot more affection for Fry than she ever has before, perhaps prompted by Fry's death. In one of Leela's coma-dreams, Fry is very romantic and she enjoys it. The alert viewer might notice that something is clearly amiss with Fry being genuinely romantic with Leela. We have seen from the beginning that Fry has no capacity for romance and usually approaches Leela with brazen lust even while thinking to himself that he is in fact being romantic. When jelly-Fry comes into being, Leela expresses great relief that "Fry" is now alive. She says nothing about feelings for him, in fact clearly denying any such feelings with, "Feeling responsible for your death was driving me mad." When Leela has reached the end of her rope, she muses, "The only time I feel alright is in my dreams," then looking at Fry's picture she adds, "with you." Perhaps here we see that Leela has feelings for Fry that she's not entirely conscious of--she constantly denies having such feelings but here she clearly has some. Fry's photo says to Leela, "I love you," but her hallucinations frighten her so much that she is unable to respond. When Leela wakes in the hospital, we realize that everything Fry said in her coma-dream was said by the real Fry at her bedside for two weeks. This is not the first time Fry has said, "I love you" to Leela, but perhaps going through this experience has matured him somewhat, which would finally give some meaning to the words. Their embrace, lacking a kiss, suggests that even if Leela has begun finally to see the desired maturity in Fry, she's still comfortable being just friends with him. Character Arcs The alert viewer might be very suspicious when Bender, whose lifelong dream is to be a folk singer and who has sung numerous times in numerous episodes, claims that he's not allowed to sing due to a "court order." This is a hint that we're in an alternate reality, just as are Fry's genuinely romantic gestures. However, it would not be impossible for an actual court to order that Bender not sing... Hermes-isms * Sweet three-toed sloth of Ice Planet Hoth Footnotes Category:Episodes Category:Season 4 Category:Episodes in which Fry almost loses Leela Category:Fry Episodes Category:Leela Episodes